This is a position paper for an upcoming workshop convened by the Council of Graduate Schools on rethinking the dissertation. In it, I reflect on what new technologies enable us to do with this critical milestone in graduate study. My main argument is that while the affordances of specific technologies can be exciting, more important is the shift…[Read more]

This dissertation explores the ways in which several fiction writers from France, the U.S., and Latin America experiment with the form of their works in writing about traumatic experience, as they navigate the tension between a propulsion toward expression and toward silence. Some of these traumas are vast, as in Edmond Jabès’ Le livre des qu…[Read more]

The paper represents an up-to-date, comprehensive and accurate account of the history of The Cahier d’ un retour au pays natal in English today. I use the early productions and reproductions of the poem to argue that Césaire’s early work is meant for an American (in the broad sense of the word) audience. Using textual evidence and archival…[Read more]

This brief piece tells the story of my discovery of the Saint-Dié Typescript of Et les chiens se taisaient. The text also provides a preliminary description of the typescript, a summary of the plot of the historical drama, as well as a brief comparison with the published version of 1946.

With the discovery of the earliest known manuscript version of Et les chiens se taisaient, we learn that Césaire had started thinking about the theater earlier than had been assumed, and most important, that he had originally envisioned this work as a historical drama based on the Haitian Revolution. “Migrant Textuality” explores the several vers…[Read more]